Imagine waking up one morning to real film footage of a duckbill dinosaur wandering around the Great Plains. Your reaction might be similar to that of birders around the world when Science magazine reported in 2005 that the ivory-billed woodpecker, thought for 60 years to have been extinct in the United States, still existed.

A forest bird of legend

The woodpecker entered birder and ecologist lore when its numbers declined in the early part of the 20th century. Its habitat was bottomland forest in the southeastern United States and Cuba, and its niche included drilling into mature trees. When people came along, logging away the woodpeckers’ homes, the bird appeared to vanish. By the 1920s, we thought it had disappeared forever, although in 1943, there was a single confirmed sighting of a lone female, flying over the stumps of an old-growth forest. She became a central figure in a PhD thesis in 1944. Then for 60 years, silence.

False calls

Well, not complete silence. There were many reports of sightings, but most were traced to another woodpecker species, the pileated woodpecker. The ivory-billed woodpecker differs distinctly from its pileated cousin in beak color, in having white patches on its back when perched, and in its size and the solid-black crest of the female. It has a three-foot wing span, which is huge for a woodpecker, and can grow as large as 20 inches long. It is a big, beautiful, and surprising bird, with a bright red crest on the males that must be startling to see among the cypress of a bottomland forest.

A mesmerizing obsession

Birders, possibly the most obsessive of any taxon fan club, had long wandered into the swampy bottomlands of Arkansas and Louisiana, trying to find ivory-billed woodpeckers. There was a confirmed sighting in Cuba in the ‘80s, and over the decades, people have claimed sightings or reported having heard the ivory-billed’s call. Professionals and amateurs alike have waded among snakes and fought off bugs, playing tapes of the call and listening for a response. At one point, searchers found a nest that had an ivory-billed look to it and trained a remote-sensing camera on it, but saw nothing.

And then in 1999, a kayaker thought that he had seen a pair of the birds. His report received serious attention from the government, local papers, and academic groups interested in the woodpecker both for its inherent beauty and for its status as a symbol of the price of our destructive tendencies. Soon, the old forests of the southeast were crawling with ornithologists, all hoping to catch a glimpse, take a picture, and emerge with definitive proof that a bird long thought to be extinct had survived.

The beat of the forest, revived?

Some people heard the drumming sounds the woodpecker is known to make. A handful of people who really knew their woodpeckers reported sightings. But it was a four-second video of the shy, reclusive bird that clinched it. The video is short and blurry, taken from a kayak in late April of 2004 on a camcorder. But even its poor quality couldn’t hide the distinctive markings and features of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

The confirmation set the world of ornithology astir, but it also reverberates among ecologists and environmentalists. The fact that at least one male ivory-billed woodpecker exists indicates that at least one breeding pair must have survived into the 1990s because the birds live 15 to 20 years at most. And it also might have meant a second chance for us and the woodpecker. Unfortunately, according to a recent report from Cornell researchers who have spent five years looking for more signs of the bird, “it’s unlikely that there are recoverable populations” of the bird where they’ve been searching.